We don’t give up. I had a customer who wanted to get into a specific ski resort in Europe during Christmas week. The first time I called, the reservations manager told me that there were more than 30 people on the waiting list in front of me. So very nicely, everyday for two months, I called her twice a day. She finally told me that she talked to me more than her husband. The next day I got a confirmation for my customer.

we have one customer who goes to London so much that when the hotel was renovating, they asked for his input on “his” room.

With the Four Seasons Resort Nevis, they didn’t have enough connecting rooms. I was in a meeting with [Chairman] Isadore Sharpe and they had only 11 connecting rooms, so I showed him which of my clients—the CEO of this company, and the CEO of that company—weren’t going to be able to have connecting rooms. And he picked up the phone and called his president, and ordered 38 more connecting rooms.

Parrot Cay in Turks & Caicos. I went and wasn’t impressed so I put it on our “do not book” list. Then a new general manager came in and I went back down, and the service and the food were terrific, but the pool wasn’t heated and it was too cold in January. So I told the general manager and he told the owner, and the owner didn’t want to heat the pool as it is very expensive. I said to the owner, “you swim in it” and he did—and to his credit, he made it into a heated pool and now we send a lot of business there.

the vice president of a luxury hotel group called me up because he couldn’t get a VIP into one of their own hotels on a holiday. He told me, and I called the hotel and I got his VIP in. When he asked the hotel how his VIP got in they said, “we always take care of Mr. Fischer.”

In all our years, we have had two bad staffers. Those two were the mistakes, but if you look at most of our team they have been with us 15 to 20 years

we once hired the top Platinum agent from American Express. She told us it took her nine months until she could get to our level.

I was the only one who could get it...tell me what you want and I’ll get it...they know our customers are willing to pay

It takes someone who really cares to take their Blackberry home with them and sleep with it, but everyone here really cares...when they need something we get it

during the volcano, we were all basically collapsing. We were working 24 hours straight

we got Thomas Keller to close French Laundry for the night and he and his team personally cooked the meal in the winery

the current fee to join is $100,000

$25,000 annual retainer

Preferred Group, where memberships start at $2,000 a month, is even more exclusive. "Some people pay more than that," says Ghobrial, who started his service in 1999 while working as a concierge at the Peninsula Beverly Hills. Like Riffaud, he has only four employees, who focus on 30 clients with a net worth of $100 million and up.

Top European hotels: "I'd mention Venice's Hotel Cipriani and the Grand Hotel a Villa Feltrinelli on Lake Garda in Italy; and in France, the Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc in Cap d'Antibes."

Top hotels in the rest of the world: "I'd say the Royal Malewane in the Thornybush Game Reserve, next to Kruger National Park in South Africa; the Amanjena resort in Marrakech; Blanket Bay in New Zealand; Hayman Island Resort in Australia; and the Four Seasons Resort Hualalai in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii."

I went around to agency owners I knew telling them I could train their people how to sell luxury travel. They all said you have to sell everything, you can’t just sell luxury travel. What I had to do was give up 80% of the clients, keep 20%, which I felt were the right 20%, and it really took 5 very very tough years to see the breakthrough.

So we called—this was at the Bellagio—we called Fountain control to have their wedding song played with the fountains.

We called 17 different people before we finally found somebody that said yes, we can do it. 16 said there’s no way, it’s all choreographed, it’s all done.

Thomas Keller from the famed French Laundry to prepare dinner for them at a winery in a vineyard that’s not open to the public

When Mr. Schwarzman's wife, Christine Hearst, was in Paris recently and decided at the last minute she wanted to take her daughter, Janet, to Jules Verne, the popular restaurant on the Eiffel Tower, Mr. Fischer went into action. ''You need six months' advance reservation,'' he said. ''She gave me six minutes.'' After 10 trans-Atlantic telephone calls, he got mother and daughter a table at Jules Verne for Janet's 10th birthday.

got clients into a small, sold-out hotel in Gstaad, Switzerland, by telephoning twice a day for three months, until a room finally opened up

On the phone to a reservations agent, Mr. Fischer is not above dropping the names of his famous clients, implying that if a hotel can accommodate client X, then a Calvin Klein or a Diane Sawyer might be steered there in the near future. One former client, however, gave a different explanation for Mr. Fischer's success: he overpays enormously for hotel rooms, and tips the staff of hot restaurants and hotels extravagantly, passing the costs back to his too-rich-to-complain clients.

''When you walk into a hotel and they know he sent you, they treat you very well -- it's like when a sugar daddy walks in and spreads the money around,'' said the former client, who spoke on condition of anonymity. He said he ceased using Mr. Fischer several years ago because he thought he was being gouged. ''He charges off the charts for everything,'' the former client said.

Responding to the claim that he gets results by lavishly greasing palms, Mr. Fischer said: ''Absolutely not. We send them clients and they like who we send. I show them my list; it's a 'Who's Who' list. We're sending the kind of people who are not going to complain and will pay for anything. The hotels want our clients.''

Tiger Woods’s golf pro doesn’t teach anymore, he only works with Tiger Woods. But we got him.

If people want to change a dining reservation in Paris from 9:00 to 9:30 they don’t call the concierge downstairs. They call us

We had a call from one of our clients who said you’ve got to get me a room for my number one client, I don’t care what it costs. I said give me his name. He said Sandy Weill. I said ‘Sandy Weill? He’s the President of American Express. He can’t get a room?’ We got him the room.

We hired someone from American Express. She went away on a seminar to Buenos Aires, and the Vice President of American Express got up to speak saying ‘We have to push the black more, we have to push the platinum more, we have to give more service. We have to be more like Fischer Travel.’